Splicing Threads
by Pisceanduality
Summary: Akito is good at breaking things, not putting them back together again. AkitoShigure. Het. 1900 words. Gift fic for Wordslinger.


"Splicing Threads"

2/24/06

By: Naraku's Miasma

* * *

She had been God. She had been the center of their universe. For years she had tugged at the threads of their lives and kept them taut like marionette strings. But in the span of a few seasons, that _stupid girl_ had ended everything.

Akito found that she did not know how to splice lives together again. One by one, _she_ had stolen them all away. Kureno first, and then one after another until the only curse left was Akito's own existence.

Her room was sweltering that day. The air was balmy and heavy; it was so thick that she felt herself weighed down by it, and so she laid herself down on the veranda, arms stretched out above her head. Her breathing felt heavy, as though the air were made of water. Her lungs burned from the dry heat of the early afternoon. Her skin flushed from the heat, like a fever she would never sweat out. She couldn't find any trace of a breeze all morning so she resigned herself to lying in her yukata, the garment open for the world to see. Akito stared out into the too bright grounds out in front of her with something less than apathy, and absently wondered what it would be like to be blind.

The soft sliding of an opening door caught her attention, but she didn't bother to move. A moment later, she heard the door shut. Too limp to push herself to move, she lay still for a few moments longer. Finally, with a kind of lethargic grace, Akito sat up but kept her back to the dim interior of the room. Akito intentionally left her yukata askew; the day was too hot to worry about decency around someone so familiar.

Besides, she mused, in the past, he'd seen more of her than just the simple slopes of her shoulder or the concave contours of her neck. She wondered if he was looking at her, body aglow with summer heat. She hoped he missed touching her.

"You came after all," she turned her head to catch him in the corner of her eye-- it was more than enough-- while he sat at the edge of traditional formalities; his eyes downcast, his back rigid and his hands sitting politely in his lap. She half expected him to add -_sama_ to her name, if he even said it at all.

"You called for me," he replied, as though their relationship was _still that simple_.

She felt a smile creep into her lips. How fitting that a dog should come when he was called. Except that it didn't fit quite the same way as it used to. The formerly taut strings of their lives were slack. She pulled and there was nothing. She missed the comfortable tug of resistance from him. She pulled because it was part of an old routine. Not because she had hope of feeling it again.

Akito rose from the floor on slow but steady limbs. She turned herself to look at him and he still looked the same; same hair, same expression, even the same damn suit. He looked like he had passed though a hole in the fence around his past, unlike her. He looked like he belonged to the time yet to pass. She, on the other hand, could never dig herself out of the past.

"You've dug a hole under the fence." Her voice was as lethargic as the summer air.

She took hollow, echoing footsteps towards him. He kept his eyes to the floor. The gesture was emptier than ever. The paper walls and the heavy air swallowed the sound of her worn out footsteps. And when she stopped in front of him, she burned that moment of time into her memory.

The sight of him was almost too much. Too much of what, exactly, she wasn't quite sure. Something bubbled beneath her skin and she shivered. But this was far from new, really. The something that crawled under her skin had lived there for a very long time. _They_ had existed for a very long time, too-- forever, perhaps--always stuck in the same old moments that replayed over and over.

Endless rehearsals where she had always held the strings.

Her denial fed itself on that moment. She could still pretend everything hadn't changed. But, inevitably, time wore on and something like awkwardness fell into the space between them. Akito had always hated improvisation; she was always at a loss. She was enraged at her own insight, and tried to play by the old script anyway.

"There is a _hole_ under the _fence_," she repeated, her voice now clearer and less like the thick wood of the floorboards.

She watched him blink slowly. A smile tugged at his mouth. He was a very smart man; he recognized the old lines; he had memorized the words a long time ago. Her brow knitted itself together and glared down at him. For a moment, she hated him more than she loved him.

"I know."

His voice was dull and warm and it filled her so quickly and so fully that she thought it might break her entirely. It wanted to pull her to the floor and curl her into herself. She wanted to cry for him and herself. Instead she pulled herself taut and upright. She reached out a hand, intending to touch the top of his head. For a moment she wanted to pull him against her and keep him there.

But the sensation of being filled to the brim passed away with a searing burn and she pulled her hand back to her side.

"You _are_ a dog." She gave out a shallow laugh of disgust.

He didn't move, didn't blink; not even when she sank down to her knees in front of him. "You're a _dog_, Shigure," she said again, her voice lower, more frail.

He kept his eyes diverted and his body rigid, as though the two of them hadn't spent countless _years_ of childhood together.

"Dogs are supposed to be _loyal_."

Still, nothing.

Her hand slithered up to take a hold of his black tie, sliding the silk through her fingers for a fraction of a second before she took a firm hold and pulled him forward. She pulled at his eyes, made him look her in the face. She gave him a dirty little smile that he would recognize. She watched as his lips parted to suck in a breath of air; she saw the beauty of his face in the half of a second he spent trying not to look her in the eye. His resolve crumbled and they both fell into the old ways again.

She pulled harder. He came closer. And like her hand on his tie, her voice slithered into his ear, "But even loyal dogs need a leash."

Akito leaned into him, her mouth a ghost against his cheek. Her kimono slipped a little farther, and she watched the reaction in his face with half lidded eyes. She watched him trace the curves of her collarbones, the angles of her wrinkled clothes, the obliqueness of her arms and legs. He knew those lines and forms better than she did.

She reclined backwards, pulling him with her. He followed her movement, crawled over her on hands and knees-- hands beside her head and knees just touching the swell of her hips. He was familiar, recognizable like this. Her fingers lost their grip on his tie and she shifted her attention to his lips. Her fingers slid their way around his neck and she lightly tugged him downward to her when he interrupted her.

"This is an old game." His eyes still looked so far away. The lust of living she had always seen in him seemed absent. "It's isn't like it used to be."

She slid her fingers up the column of his neck, nails gently raking over his skin. She ran her thumb over his bottom lip and she brushed her hip along the inside of his thigh.

And then there was a dull pull on one of the strings she used to know so intimately. The pull was weak and frail and Akito was reminded of her own existence. She caught herself, froze and tried to hold onto the fleeting sensation of being connected to someone again. Staring up at him with his foreign eyes, she wondered if he felt as listless and empty as she had when her menagerie had been emptied one creature at a time.

But, in the end, the feeling had fled just as quickly as it had come. Akito let out the breath she'd been holding. She let her fingers fall from his face and she turned her head away. Her eyes fluttered closed and she felt her lips curl into an ironic smile. She felt her throat grow tight and she suddenly wasn't sure if she wanted him here anymore. She opened her eyes and stared at the white sleeves of his dress shirt.

She felt the tight smile on her mouth fade away. His breath tickled the spot beneath her ear lobe. "Ask me to do it, and I will," he whispered to her.

She could feel the fringe of his hair against her cheek. His voice was deep and his breath was hot against her skin. She unconsciously took in a heavy breath. The air was heavier than before and she thought maybe she'd never have enough.

"Stay with me, Shigure."

He gave a very soft laugh against her neck and he took her ear into his mouth. She felt his teeth graze her skin and she could not remember the last time she had felt this alive.

"_Ask_ me."

His mouth found the place where her should met her neck; it was another secret place that made her gulp for air and he knew at least a dozen more. A sigh evaporated from her mouth and hung in the stale summer air. She really had no choice.

"Will you stay with me?"

A small noise erupted from the back of her throat and her hands crept up to his face by their own volition. She steeled herself and threaded her fingers in his hair. She pulled him from his ministration to make him look her in the eye.

She smiled a small, open mouthed smile; the hazy, dark look she'd been looking for was present now. She stared up at him, waiting for some kind of answer.

"Will you?" Akito hated sounding vulnerable. He loved it.

His eyes wandered to her lips and stayed there. He said nothing at all, his mouth soon over her own in a bruising kiss. "Of course," he murmured against her lips.

The same weak pull returned and it made a delicious heat pool in her belly. She wanted to melt into the floorboards and Shigure's hands. The pull had not been as extraordinarily wonderful as she remembered and no where near as strong as it had been before that _girl. _

But it was a tug. The strings she had kept wrapped around her fingers were gone and nothing could replace them.

This dull tug was all she had left.

_He_ was all she had left.

* * *


End file.
